I fled Los Angeles last night… well, crawled out is more like it.  With all the traffic, it took me three hours just to make it to Palm Springs, normally a less-than-2-hour trip.  Once I cleared traffic, though, I definitely set some land-speed records on my way to Tucson.  Part of it was due to the fact that I’d only gotten 4 hours of sleep on Monday night, I wanted to make sure I got to Tucson before I just couldn’t go any further.  But thanks to about 4 Diet Cokes that I had with dinner, I not only was still awake when I got in at 3am (which was 4am local time), I also had to stop a couple of extra times to visit the local men’s rooms.  And I think I may have discovered the Most Awful Bathroom in the Western U.S. — it’s just off the 10 freeway somewhere near Desert Center, CA, and it totally reminded me of the bathroom in Trainspotting.  Yeah, you know which one I’m talking about.  I’m surprised I didn’t offer up a personal contribution to the filth, but I managed to keep the bile (and remains of dinner) down.  Just thinking about it now makes me a little nauseous.

Either way, I did my usual tradition when I got in late last night/early this morning:  I stood outside and just looked up at the night sky.  When you live in a place like Los Angeles, you’re lucky if you see maybe a dozen or so stars.  But out here, where the entire area is under light-restriction and there’s definitely not as much light pollution as there is in L.A., I could see thousands.  It really is breathtaking.

After a four-hour nap, I woke up this morning, booted up and worked from my parents’ back porch for the day.  I’ve got to say… when it’s sunny and 75 and your view looks like this, work can be pretty nice.  I was interrupted a few times though, because the roadrunners kept coming up to the porch looking for food, so I had to go to the fridge and get some raw meat for them.  Yes, roadrunners are carnivorous.  Gives you a slightly different spin on those Wile E. Coyote cartoons, doesn’t it?